


will you be my comfort

by picturecat



Series: 3490 fics [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Earth-3490, F/M, Female Tony Stark, M/M, Minor Injuries, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23633815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picturecat/pseuds/picturecat
Summary: Steve Rogers hates HYDRA. Toni Stark hates being surprised, and also HYDRA.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Natasha Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: 3490 fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034253
Comments: 9
Kudos: 81





	will you be my comfort

“Almost done,” the EMT says, bracingly. Steve’s had far worse. The burn of the stitches is a bearable sting— far more irritating is the delay from being able to join the clean-up crews. 

“Alright! You’re good to go, although—“ she leaned back and shrugged sympathetically. “You may want to clean up. Help yourself to the sanitizer wipes.” The EMT climbs out of the back of the half-crushed ambulance. 

Steve tears open one of the wipe packets and does his best to clean the blood off his face where he can feel it. He’s certain to miss some, though, working blind. 

“Hold on, soldier,” someone says, and Steve feels his shoulders slump, relaxing. “Let me help.”

It’s Toni. Her hair is in a ponytail, damp with sweat and frizzy, and she’s wearing only the form-fitting black undersuit of the armor. The armor itself is a few feet away, in sentry mode. 

He smiles openly at her as she clambers into the back of the ambulance, walking on her knees to him and his pile of wipes. He leans in for a kiss. She stops him with a finger on his lips, eyes crinkled in a smile as she takes the opened wipe from him and swipes it over his mouth. It comes away rusty with dried blood. 

She hums a little and then kisses him properly, chaste except for the slip of tongue she gives him at the last second. 

“How many stitches?” She cleans around the cut with a fresh wipe and slow, gentle motions. 

“Four,” he says, tilting his head to the direction of her hand on his jaw. “Not bad, just messy.” 

She uses the wipe until it’s muddy red all over, and then switches to a new one, swiping over skin that she’s already cleaned— getting leftover smears of blood, doubtlessly— and then bringing it down over his jaw. 

The wipe scratches slightly there. Dragging across the prickles of his five o’clock shadow, which is really more of a three AM shadow, given the hour. 

He thinks of that morning. Him shaving with the straight razor Toni got him as an anniversary gift. Toni at the other sink, applying makeup for the meeting she never got to finish. She’d been dressed already except for her feet, bare on the tile. 

Something like 20 hours later, the night is dark and cold around them and her makeup is still there, smoky eyeshadow in browns and silver and cracked hints of a lipstick that’s long since been chewed off. 

Toni finishes with the wipes, turning his head gently to inspect her work. 

“Done?” he asks. 

“Done,” she confirms, and plops heavily next to him, curling slightly into his side. His arm comes up automatically, wrapping around her shoulders, and he tucks his nose into her hair, just… breathing. 

She smells like she usually does after a battle— sweat and metal and skin. He’s picking up the faintest faded whiff of her perfume, as well, but he doubts anyone else could smell it. 

There’s only about a hundred things that probably need their personal attention right now. No way are either of them getting to sleep for hours, between the cleanup and the debrief and the press. 

For the moment, however, neither of them are willing to break the relative quiet of the moment they’ve found. 

He’s not sure what Toni’s thinking about. Maybe the moment she’d just barely blocked the bullets headed for his back. Or those few terrifying seconds he’d been in freefall— her shouted “No!” as they both realized she wouldn’t make it in time— before Thor had broken his fall. 

For his part, it’s the moment he received the alert from the silent alarm Toni keeps on her at all times. He’d been halfway to a mission taking down a HYDRA bunker in Nebraska when it went off, and not half a minute later, Fury was calling to tell him HYDRA had gone after his wife. 

The breadth and fury and the emotion that overtook him then had swept away all reason and sensibility. Terror, yes, more than a little, but mostly—

Rage. 

Hadn’t he lost enough to HYDRA? Hadn’t he, personally, sacrificed so much trying to bury that particular evil?

And yet here it was, that same organization, trying once again to destroy the hard-won joy and companionship he’d managed to find in this century. 

Of course Toni had been a tactical target as well— she was as much a threat to HYDRA’s endgame as Steve was— but given the fact they’d live-streamed the damned murder attempt, there could be little doubt it was personal. 

And it was HYDRA. It was always personal. 

“Do you think we don’t plan enough for the future?”

Steve looked down. Toni was laying back, stretching out sideways to put her head in his lap. Steve lifted her head briefly, smoothing her hair out from where it was snagging on his uniform.

“Is scale mail a comfortable pillow?” he asked instead of answering. 

“No, but your He-Man thighs are.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I think we should be doing more.”

“What do you mean by more?” Steve said. “Because intel—”

“Not intel. I mean, not _not_ intel, but jeez no, not intel. There’s a reason we leave that to SHIELD. Can you imagine how quickly we’d be dragged in front of like, congressional committees—”

“What do you mean by more?” he repeated. He paused. “What do you mean by the future?”

“The Avengers will have a legacy. In some ways we already do. But we are, by nature, reactionary.”

That was her lecturing voice, for when she was summarizing quantum physics. Steve nodded, fighting a smile.

“Okay. Is reactionary a problem?”

“Not yet. But look, if you and I were taken out by HYDRA—”

“—I’ll die of an infected splinter before I let HYDRA—”

“— my point is if something happens to us that’s a solid fifth of the Avengers.”

Steve paused. “You want to recruit.”

Toni waggled her wrist at him. “Not in such immediate terms. Half recruit, half… brain trust. In the event of fire, you break the glass, there’s an extinguisher.”

“Are we the fire or the emergency glass?”

“It’s about what’s next, Steve. Not the next bad guy or the next interplanetary threat or the next natural disaster. The next superheroes. The next Avengers.”

“Sounds catchy.” Steve smiled down at her. “You know I’m on your team.”

“In everything except Monopoly, baby.”

The armor blooped twice, its eyes flashing like headlights, and Toni hauled herself to her feet with a groan. Steve hurried to offer Toni help stepping down from the back of the ambulance, which she accepted with the usual wry grace of a woman accustomed to having a husband-slash-step-stool.

Toni held her wrist up to the armor and the gauntlet wrapped around it, shifting and clicking until a thick-banded silver watch encircled her wrist. She tapped at the interface. 

“That’s debrief time,” she said. “Talk about this later?”

“Yes. Although something tells me you have an idea already.”

She snorted. “It’s like you know me.”

She stepped forward and the armor took over, rising to greet her like a metallic tide. When it settled, she was Iron Woman, and she held an arm out for him to step up. 

“Hold tight, Captain. It’ll be a wild ride.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I'm polishing and dumping some of my WIPs because I'm like, 500 words away from finishing a long story I've promised to someone else and I'm stuck and angry about it. :)


End file.
